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Why is this being downvoted? Depressing to see that open source software is not respected here.

• sandworm101 5y ago
  People downvote things that make them angry. The things that make people most angry are those things that strike closest to home. An incorrect or unacceptable comment will be downvoted and commented on, even reported. A perfectly valid and true statement, one that is so true that it scares people, will be silently downvoted. It is a form of denial, an attempt to remove a painful truth.
• simondotau 5y ago
  I didn't downvote it, but I can understand why some people might have. Because while it's superficially true, it's disingenuous in practice. All security is, at its core, a network of trust between you and other entities. Open source isn't secure because it's open, it's secure because you trust Canonical, you trust Linus Torvalds, you trust GNU, etc. And those people trust other people—hence the "network" of trust. Saying that you can inspect the source code is true in theory. But unless you've done the full audit yourself, you're personally as blind as you are with closed source code. You're choosing to trust whichever security researchers deeply understand the security implications of all the gobbledegook in all the USB drivers, and you're trusting that Canonical is shipping you the same version that security researchers have validated. For 99.9% of users, it all comes down to blind trust. As Linus himself once said: "If you have ever done any security work and it didn't involve the concept of a network of trust, it was not a security work. It was masturbation."